Tinkering with my new digital camera

My incredibly messy black hole of a desk:



Moi:

Question 3

Using any of the disasters or terrorist attack events to comment on the unique role that citizen journalism can play in providing first-hand news accounts during times of emergencies and disasters.

Mainstream media journalists may be able to be in the area of a hurricane as it is happening, but most of them don't live there. While we watch the television screen, we also watch reporters get blown about, roofs fly off of buildings, rain slap down on the ground, and wind break trees in half. But those of us who simply watch could never really know what it was like to live in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit there.

Bloggers and wikis might just give us a small insight, though. By inviting people who have been personally affected by the hurricane to take part in documenting the event, readers can get a better idea of what those in the gulf were experiencing. Brendan Loy has a wiki up for people to share their experiences, their pictures, and their stories with others. There are entire lists of links to local bloggers, "big-media" bloggers, photo albums, and charity organizations. The introduction to the wiki says it all:

"Anyone can edit this page! If you find a link that you think should be added, by all means, add it! Simply click the "edit" button at the top of the section you would like to edit."

While pages such as Loy's offer major insight into the lives of the people personally affected by Katrina, it also offers a chance to become involved in aiding those who need help in it's aftermath. At the very top of the page is a section: "Missing persons, volunteer info, relief effort, etc." While the mainstream media focused mainly on getting the information out there, citizen journalism focused on making the audience a part of it.

There was even a "weekend of blogging focused on raising awareness of and funds for relief efforts to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina" in which all different kinds of bloggers from all over the country participated. All the major blogs participated, including Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and others.

In the end, citizen journalism offered a more personal, intimate view of the hurrican and its aftermath, as well as mobilized people to take action in helping those affected.

American Library Association's Banned Books Week

h/t: The Leaky Cauldron

Strange and Mysterious?

I don't have much time to elaborate here, but LGF has a fun one where we get to see how Dan Rather is reacting from being a "victim" of the new grassroots movement.

What surprises me here is that just a refined, accomplished journalist is criticizing the free flow of information.

Hillary Clinton looking after peoples' rights?

The Drudge Report has a snippet from Hillary Clinton and her thoughts on Internet journalism. It seems that because Hillary Clinton (and her husband) turned out to be one of the "victims" of the new grassroots movement in journalism (The Drudge Report broke the story of her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky), she turned a bit bitter towards the movement.

This quote that Drudge "flashes back" to was made in 1998, but it still makes me fuming angry:

I don't have any clue about what we're going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically -- I don't have a clue. But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance. I'm a big pro-balance person. That's why I love the founders -- checks and balances; accountable power. Anytime an individual or an institution or an invention leaps so far out ahead of that balance and throws a system, whatever it might be -- political, economic, technological --out of balance, you've got a problem, because then it can lead to the oppression people's rights, it can lead to the manipulation of information, it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes which we have seen historically. So we're going to have to deal with that. And I hope a lot of smart people are going to --

My favorite part is the she's afraid of oppressing people's rights. People's rights? How about freedom of the press, Ms. Clinton? Your regulation might just take the hobby that I love out of my hands.

Anyway, Drudge, an obviously right-slanted journalist, is re-posting this because "China imposed new media restrictions designed to limit the news and other information available to Internet users... restricting the scope of content that can be posted on Web sites."

Question #2

Use a few of Eric Raymond's principles of open source development in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and apply them to Gillmor's discussion of the impact of openness in the chapter, "The Gates Come Down" in We the Media (44-65). How can the open source development model help explain some of the new transparencies that Gillmor discusses in this chapter?

The most important principle that we can take from Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar to apply to Dan Gillmor's "The Gates Come Down" in We the Media is the sixth one: Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. Raymond's principle emphasizes the need to treat regular citizens as partners in your goal to get the best information out there; this applies to both software debugging and journalism. In a journalistic sense, treating citizens as partners and cowriters would be an important strategy in blurring the line between mainstream media and grassroots, citizen journalism. The gates that Gillmor refers to are those of the streamlined editing process; by bringing those gates down, we are sharing the work and creating an open-source journalism.

Raymond also makes the point that software should be released early and often (his seventh point). This is also a major characteristic of grassroots journalism according to Gillmor's view in his book:

...outsiders of all kinds can probe more deeply into newsmakers' businesses and affairs. They can disseminate what they learn more widely and more quickly. And, it's never been easier to organize like-minded people to support, or denounce, a person or a cause. The communications-enabled grassroots is a formidable truth squad.

Blogging, according to Gillmor and many others, makes access to stories a much quicker process. Many professional journalists even find their story ideas from blogs. When bloggers publish early and often, the flow of news can sometimes be overwhelming yet exciting at the same time.

As the idea of open-source software helps to mold the open-source journalism revolution, the two are beginning to merge with ease.

Race and the Ladies of the Gulf

Jonah Goldberg of the National Review takes a look at media room diversity and Hurricane Katrina. ALAS! New Orleans was full of poor black people BEFORE Katrina hit:

You'd think the media would have learned their lesson. After Katrina, the press corps waited a full two days after the storm hit before it was able to report that one of America's poorest and blackest cities was full of poor and black people.

Goldberg makes the very astute point that a biased mainstream media spent so much time focusing on the race issue that the devastation of the hurricane itself was left in the dust:

Last week, at Nebraska Wesleyan University, I joined CNN's Carlos Watson at an event to discuss media bias. The subject of Katrina was thick in the air and while Watson clung to his status as an "objective" media analyst, he was keen to discuss the "race and class" angle of the story.

He fervently believed that if the media were more diverse, then the federal response to Katrina would have been more Johnny-on-the-Spot. Black folks and other minorities would have recognized the race and class issues sooner, and therefore would have raised a stink faster. As it was, it took two days after Katrina struck for the media even to mention race and class in a serious way.

This, quoth Watson, was proof of his very point. It took two days for the most important story angle of Katrina even to get discussed. I objected that perhaps the most important story angle wasn't in fact that a famously poor and black city was still famously poor and black. Perhaps, I suggested, the lead story was the fact that an enormous hurricane destroyed a major American city and much of the surrounding area [emphasis mine].

We do need more newsroom diversity in order to have a plethora of angles, viewpoints, and backgrounds contributing to a story. However, if we are to place black people in the newsroom in order to cover more black people, the whole point of it is absurd. Perhaps newsroom diversity is necessary to cover people.

Meanwhile, there's a new lady of the house:

GP2X

Boing Boing tells me today that there's a new handheld computer out there, called the GP2X. It's Linux-based and does all kinds of nice things:

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.
It runs the free Linux operating system. This means a whole world of Games, Utilities and Emulators are at your disposal. Quake, Doom, SNES, Megadrive, MAME, Media players and Applications to name just a few.

Apparently it's cheap as well. Only $124.99, even cheaper than my iPod shuffle, which I've been trying to swap out for a digital camera. Now I've got something else to tempt me:



I want one.

TimesSelect and the End of the New York Times

Okay, maybe it's not the end. But I sure can't afford $49.95 a month to read what bloggers around the country will be posting for free. From the New York Times web site:



TimesSelect seems to be a simple attempt to make money off of web publications that the New York Times has offered for free for too long. I doubt that too many people will be buying this though; those that do have too much money to throw around.

Just today in my Writing for Online Publications class, Gary Chapman told us that there are rumors of the Wall Street Journal ending it's print publication because it's just too expensive to distribute. I wonder if the same might eventually happen to the New York Times.

A Trend of Transparency

Today is the one-year anniversary of what many have come to call Rathergate. One year ago today, Dan Rather presented the American people with documents that were supposed to prove that George W. Bush never fulfilled his duty in the National Guard. The documents were later proved to be fake at the hands of bloggers who took it upon themselves to conduct their own reporting.

Jay Rosen, an associate journalism professor at New York University, has written an open letter to CBS in which he graciously welcomes them to the Internet:

People of CBS News, the Net knows more than you. The chances are fairly high that a given producer at CBS would not know enough southern history to grasp what Senator Trent Lott was actually saying when he praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 campaign for president. The chances of the blogosphere not knowing this background are zero.

Rosen uses Rathergate as a sign of a failing mainstream media. However, Rosen cites Larry Kramer, the head of CBS Digital, as saying that every single reporter at CBS now contributes to CBSNews.com. Rosen declares that what happened a year ago with CBS is a sign of citizens' yearning for journalistic transparency. He encourages CBS to become a part of the interaction with the American public:

But this is supposed to be a conversation, and I want to know, and I am not alone. So as I like to say at my own blog, if you have a thought hit the comment button. And congratulations, all of you, on making it to the Web.

I was enraged by Rathergate, as was much of the public. The response to the airing of the report with those fake documents represents for us the power of the public to reveal the story behind the story. Bloggers are a true example of that. In the mean time, the mainstream media had better take a grasp on this trend of transperancy or the trust may no longer be there.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Question 1

Compare the perspectives of blogging as journalism presenting by Lasica in Blogging as a Form of Journalism (in We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing our Culture) with the Gillmor's introduction chapter to We The Media. Do they share a similar perspective in the role that blogging can play in transforming journalism?

Dan Gillmor, a professional journalist turned blogger, puts a lovely historical perspective on blogging in his book, We The Media. I truly appreciate how he linked the emergence of the blogosphere with the September 11th attacks:

Via emails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal web journals--all nonstandard news sources--we received valuable context that the major American media couldn't, or wouldn't, provide.

Gillmor goes on to describe blogging as a major revolution in journalism, just as television had done when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

JD Lasica also describes blogging as a sort of journalism revolution. He describes blogging as a "Ground Zero of the personal webcasting revolution," an almost-reference to the September 11th attacks.

In short, both Gillmor and Lasica have a similar view of blogs, which I agree with. Blogs have a major place in history as a new medium for journalism that focuses on democracy and citizenry as foundations for journalistic projects. Blogging is a new way for the people to get involved with each other, sharing stories and accounts while yearning for and gathering information on their own.

Bloggers Buzz over Potty Break

Everyone seems to be going crazy over this hilarious photo from Reuters of President Bush asking for a potty break.



Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Google Blog Search

Google has launched a new search engine specifically for blogs:



It is inevitable that this endeavor will fail because there are three words in the title. You have Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Images, Google News. But Google BLOG SEARCH? Where's the clever, short title meant for the short-attention spans of America? Heck, they could have even went with one word like they did for "Froogle."

Glog Search.

Never mind.

In the mean time, Technorati has a very gracious response.

I'm moving around a bit.

For a while I've been blogging at a place called FemCon.

Well, upon googling the name, I discoverd that Femcon is some kind of French perscription drug meant for women, and only women. You can imagine my horror.

So, I've dropped the name and have decided to turn my blog over a whole new leaf.

Okay, and this is for a class. On blogging. How awesome is that?

You can look forward to more content-driven posts, and a lot of blogging/citizen journalism talk. I hope you enjoy.